Liens

SAN FRANCISCO was one of several cities dubbed the “Paris of the West” in the early 20th century. The description was inspired by the charms of the Tenderloin district, an area that bustled with commerce and high culture after it avoided the worst of the 1906 earthquake that levelled three-quarters of the city.From that high point the Tenderloin's reput […]

P.W. SINGER and August Cole discuss their new thriller, in which America's navy fights back against a Chinese invasion of Hawaii with the support of hackers, venture capitalists and an eccentric Australian billionaire

IN 2013 the American Society of Civil Engineers released its four-yearly report card on the state of the nation's infrastructure. It estimated that $3.6 trillion of investments were needed across the country, and gave the roads an abysmal D grade for their condition. Bridges fared a little better with a C+.Such results stand in stark contrast to those m […]

WHEN Ivan Turgenev wrote “A Month in the Country” he called it “The Student”. Then he changed his mind and called it “Two Women”. And then, of course, he changed his mind again. Critics have compared the plot—a woman and her step-daughter fall in love with the same employee—to Balzac’s “The Step-Mother”, which opened in 1848 (when Turgenev was in Paris writi […]

MANAGING the needs of one artist fretting about one project is difficult enough. Juggling 20 such projects every other year is the arts administrator’s version of chicken, a game at which Alex Poots, the outgoing artistic director of the Manchester International Festival (MIF), is alarmingly adept. Over the festival’s 10-year history, only one show—this year […]

"STATION TO STATION" started life, as you might expect, on a train. Doug Aitken's original idea was simple and ambitious: to stage a series of creative events during the course of a 4,000-mile ride from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The journey took place over 24 days in 2013, and as well as performances on the train itself the project in […]

ON THE first Sunday of Krakow's recent Jewish Culture Festival several rain-soaked families took their seats in a tiny pop-up library behind a 15th-century synagogue. It is the oldest of seven in Kazimierz, the historically Jewish quarter where the festival takes place every year. Agnieszka Legutko and Anna Rozenfeld greeted the group: “Shalom aleikhem […]